> I'm glad you made that point. So I should instead not worry about the
> size/look of my box and instead focus on making sure I can fit all of the
> components I need, and then later on get a separate frontend system that
> is
> closer to what I want it to look like.
In that case you might want to give up on "small and cute" for
now and just concentrate on effective cooling and low noise. Once
you're talking a tower case, you start getting into some much more
interesting (exotic even) cooling solutions.
Although you probably can't go too cheap on the case. You probably
still need to get a tower from one of the HTPC vendors that is meant to
be cool & quiet.
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